How to Draw House Designs

You’ve dreamed of it for a very long but it’s your house and you want to design it. It will have four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a garage and the most wonderful kitchen ever viewed by human eyes. You know there are a ton of design programs on the market but they’re all so complicated. So, how do you design a home without a computer program?

If you’ve ever seen a blueprint, you’ve noticed that there are walls and little gometric shapes that look like a toilet and bathtub, and those curved arches with a line leading from them. The shapes and curved arches come from a drafting stencil. Stencils and drafting paper can be purchased at most office supply stores. For reference purposes, those curved arches are doors and they mark the direction of swing—the way the door will open and close. Houses are designed on a quarter-scale. On the scale, each quarter-inch marks a foot, so that four-quarters are four-feet. A home of 1750 square feet, at $88 per square feet will cost $150,000. It’s a point of reference but it’s the average price of a home today. So with this in mind, you can design your home.

The design:

1. Organize your wants and needs on a piece of paper. Decide how many rooms including bathrooms, den, living area, kitchen and laundry room you want and how you want them configured within the house. Be certain to give each room a size (ex: 10 feet-by-12 feet for a bedroom).


2. Find the items such as windows and doors online so that will you will be able to add the measurements to your design. Combine the measurements of the rooms in the configuration you want so that they will fit into the area you draft for the house.


3. Gather your paper, stencils, scale ruler and your list for the design in an area large and flat enough to draw on and begin with your exterior walls. Remember one-quarter inch is equal to one foot.


4. Mark your windows with two small lines vertically, and one line between them horizontally. Add the measurements for your windows. Draw the windows to the outside of your walls.


5. Draw your interior walls next leaving a space equal to the measurement for your doors. Add the closets and your doors, and if you’re sure what each symbol is for on the stencil, add your bathroom fixtures.
   
   As a design to take to a certified architect, your work will be the basis for the house you’ve always dreamed of building; however, before a house can be built it has to have an architect’s seal. A full set of plans will include electrical, plumbing and elevations but you’ve designed the basis for a home.